Lack of Respect Pushes
Employees Over the Edge

By

Sue Shellenbarger

Updated Jan. 26, 2000 12:01 a.m. ET

For years, Pat Walter was the most loyal employee any company could want. His parents had been franchisees of the restaurant concern where he worked. His mother-in-law had worked there for decades, and Mr. Walter was a rising management star. "I truly loved the company," he says. He put up with a lot to stay-rigid bosses, difficult transfers and a lock-step career path.

So what was the deal-breaker -- the affront so egregious that it drove Mr. Walter to quit?

One act by his former employer, he says, showed such a profound lack of concern for him that he couldn't brush it off. His boss ordered him to fly to a monthly budget meeting in a distant city even though his pregnant wife was three days overdue. By the time he got a phone call that his wife would undergo an emergency Caesarean section, it was too late to catch a plane home.

Years later, says Mr. Walter, now CEO of a Florida specialty-coffee company, he and his wife are still so pained by the memory that they never discuss it.

Many companies are fairly quick to fix the nuts-and-bolts problems that drive workers out the door. Tending to such basic workplace issues as fair pay, satisfaction with day-to-day activities and career prospects does help retain workers, of course.

But several "softer" workplace traits can be deal-breakers too, making employees so angry that they quit regardless of other incentives to stay. Nearly all the employee-commitment studies name such touchy-feely attributes as care and concern, trust, respect or fairness as essential to building loyalty. Hewitt Associates, Lincolnshire, Ill., cites trusting, respectful on-the-job relationships as a factor. Watson Wyatt Worldwide says trust in leaders is one of the two most powerful drivers of employee commitment.

But many employers have a hard time believing these soft issues really matter to workers, and they're stumbling on this front. In a recent study of nearly 3,000 workers by the Hudson Institute and Walker Information, both of Indianapolis, care and concern for employees, fairness and trust are cited as the areas needing most attention: 56% of employees surveyed said their employers fail to show concern for them, 45% said their companies failed to treat them fairly, and 41% said their employers failed to trust them. Partly as a result, only 24% of employees are "truly loyal" to their companies -- that is, they express commitment to their employers and plan to stay for at least two years.

"A lot of this is golden-rule kind of stuff," says Marc Drizin, a vice president at Walker Information. "Do people ask me how I'm doing? Would the company help if I had a personal emergency? Does it provide family-friendly benefits? Do people pay attention to how I feel at work? And are they developing me for the long term, not just for the current job?" Trust entails allowing employees to manage their own time and resources and letting them try new ways of working, Mr. Drizin says.

A look at some examples shows why these issues can be such powerful deal-breakers for workers. Debra Young had an interesting job as a marketing manager for an Internet start-up. But one practice there turned her off cold: Every week, all employees had to fill out a time sheet accounting for every hour they had spent working, then turn it in to the CEO. The lack of trust helped drive a lot of employees, including Ms.Young, out the door, she says. "No one likes being Big Brothered like that. It causes a lot of hard feelings."

Ms. Young found a new post through Flexible Resources, a Greenwich, Conn., staffing and consulting firm, as a marketing manager for New England Mechanical Services, Vernon, Conn. There, employees work together to set goals and are trusted to arrange their work hours, she says. The result: "People accomplish their goals, and more."

In another instance, a lack of respect for attorneys at some New York City law firms created a windfall of applicants for a competitor. When Morris, Duffy, Alonso & Faley, also in New York, advertised about 1 1/2 years ago for new associates, Kevin Faley and his partners heard a disturbing refrain from the more than 60 attorneys who responded.

Candidate after candidate said they were trying to escape abusive treatment by partners at their firms, including being belittled and yelled at. "They'd say, 'I have to leave. The partner I'm assigned to is overbearing and yelling and screaming all the time, and it's humiliating,' " Mr. Faley says.

More employers are probing such concerns, judging from the boom in internal employee surveys and other methods of gathering worker feedback. One newsletter, "Employee Recruitment & Retention," recommends setting up a company e-mail address to receive anonymous messages about the reasons people quit.

Such efforts are likely to draw far more honest insights than exit interviews in the quest to find out just what angers employees. They're sensible steps toward helping employers learn about their own deal-breakers -- before their employees jump ship to their competitors.

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